Courses

4 courses in Civics

Citizenship & Naturalization Basics

A clear, non-partisan guide to U.S. citizenship: who is a citizen at birth (birthright and through parents), how the naturalization process works step by step, what the civics and English test cover, the Oath of Allegiance, and the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. Cited to USCIS, the National Archives, and Congress.gov. Rules and fees change, this course teaches how the system works and where to confirm current requirements, and takes no position on immigration policy.

$9.99

Forms of Government, Honestly

A course about the labels we put on governments, and why sorting the world's states into 'democracy,' 'autocracy,' 'monarchy,' or 'republic' is a contested argument, not a vocabulary quiz. It is course 2 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, taught you to read authority from the primary record. Here you learn the classical forms and what they actually mean (democracy, republic, monarchy, autocracy, oligarchy, theocracy), and then the harder and more useful skill: how to read a classification critically. The heart of the course is that the four major measurement projects, V-Dem at the University of Gothenburg, the Polity project, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, rank the same countries differently, on published methodologies, because they define democracy differently and measure different things. You will learn what each project measures, who codes it, and the four reasons their rankings diverge, especially for the hard cases in the middle: hybrid regimes, competitive authoritarianism, one-party states, and constitutional monarchies that are functionally democracies. It closes with a map of who measures democracy and from where, and a capstone: classify one real country by two different indices and explain the gap between them from the published methodologies. The course never asserts a country's current score from memory; it teaches you to read the current report yourself.

$19

How Countries Constitute Themselves

The course about the constitution itself: the document course 1 kept walking the chain of authority up to, and the machinery every country builds to say who holds power and how it is limited. It is course 3 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and the vertical stack, and it treats that course as its prerequisite. You will learn to read any constitution on three axes. The first is the horizontal question: who holds executive power, and how is it linked to the legislature? That is the difference between a parliamentary system (where the executive sits in the legislature and survives on its confidence), a presidential system (where a separately elected president holds executive power for a fixed term), and a semi-presidential system (a president and a prime minister at once), and you will learn the trade-offs and the genuine scholarly fight over whether presidentialism is more fragile and whether semi-presidential is even a coherent category. The second axis is territorial: federal or unitary. The third is the form: codified into one written document or uncodified and scattered, as in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel, and rigid or flexible to amend. Then the course turns to how constitutions are actually made, taught through four real cases on four routes: the United States in 1787 by a convention that then had to be ratified, South Africa in 1996 by a negotiated transition a court had to certify, Japan in 1947 by a text the occupying power largely wrote, and Germany in 1949 by Germans drafting at home inside limits the Allies set. It closes with a world map of constitutional systems and a capstone: trace how one real constitution was made and classify its system from the primary documents. This course teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.

Free

Indiana Civics: How Your State Government Works

A practical, non-partisan guide to how the state of Indiana governs itself, and how you take part where you live. You'll learn Indiana's 1851 constitution and its distinctive strict state-debt clause (a de-facto balanced budget); the three state branches, including a deliberately weak governor whose veto can be overridden by a SIMPLE majority; how a bill becomes an Indiana law in the General Assembly (a 100-member House and a 50-member Senate); local government across Indiana's 92 counties and its more than 1,000 townships; and Indiana's elections rules: strict photo voter ID (upheld in Crawford v. Marion County), excuse-required mail voting, and a registration deadline 29 days out. It closes on how to get involved where you live. Cited to Indiana's own official sources (in.gov, iga.in.gov, in.gov/sos, in.gov/courts). Because state facts vary and change, the course flags time-sensitive items (like the Superintendent-to-Secretary-of-Education change and the Auditor-to-Comptroller rename) and points you to Indiana's own sources to confirm the current rule.

Free